Why does drinking carbonated drinks worsen the effect of spicy food?
In: Biology
It seems this has been studied more thoroughly than I had imagined. You see, capsaicin, the active ingredient in chili, activates these receptor proteins, which sense painful heat. As you can imagine, this fools your brain into perceiving it as heat, often painful heat. CO2 in soda has an effect on acidity, given that we have the bicarbonate buffer (don’t want to get too complex, but simple Le Chatelier’s principle says you can push a chemical reaction forward or pull it back by changing levels of reactants or products, and by this, adding CO2 shifts the reaction leading to a dip in pH, acidity). This acidity can be sensed also by nociceptive (pain) receptors, but not TRPV1, it activates TRPA1. So it doesn’t compound on the effect of capsaicin at the molecular level, but it does so at the cellular/neuronal or perceptive level. So chili is giving you mild pain, then carbonation gives you some more pain, making you feel it got worse. I can cite some papers but there’s a lot of them, just Google “carbonation and TRPA1” and pubmed will have plenty to offer.
Edit: Added a word
Actually this is a nice review: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4667542/
Guy even mentions a Facebook page talking about combing soda with chili. But he says we don’t have evidence for an interaction but they both are agonists (activators) of TRP receptors. So I suppose we can’t be sure why they feel worse together but it sounds plausible they do interact judging from their mechanisms (we just don’t know at what level like molecule, taste bud, neuron, or higher brain processing/gustatory cortex).
Edit: apologies to everybody for bending rule 4, but thankfully others have provided good simpler versions of the explanations.
Simplified: CO2 in soda has an effect on acidity, which gives a pain/burn that normally you don’t detect that well. Capsaicin or other spices are hot, so they both give a pain/burn, so imagine adding 1 + 1. We know 1 + 1 + 2 so we can prove 1 pain + 1 other pain = 2 pains, or in other words, the pain gets stronger.
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